Continued, Girl’s Girl
The hostess led us through the crowded restaurant, passing red booth tables and people with pizza in their mouths, all of them families, kids seated on laps and leaning from raised chairs, men wearing sports paraphernalia, and women with unwashed hair.
Figuratively, we were overdressed. I’d stuck rhinestones to the corners of El’s gray eyes.
Literally, we were underdressed, our clothing covering only a very limited portion of our bodies.
I gripped my phone tightly in my right hand.
I hadn’t brought a purse, because I thought purses were stupid; I had nothing to put in one.
We’d known what the scene would be at the restaurant—we’d all eaten there a hundred times—but chosen to pursue our outfits anyway.
We didn’t mind. Well, we meant not to mind.
But now that we’d arrived, I felt pretty conspicuous, pretty dramatically out of sorts with our environment, the artistry I’d performed on my own and Margaret’s chests too visible beneath the fluorescent lights.
These weren’t the people I wanted to look at my boobs.
I couldn’t have said who were—an uncertainty that fed my love of posting photos.
One benefit of the internet is the generalized audience for your body.
My height didn’t help either. I was almost five foot eight at the time, with coltish legs and a wingspan half a size too large for my body.
I knew I sometimes startled women in the grocery store with my baby face appearing so high up in the air.
I was aware or wanted to believe that my height was an advantage.
Models were tall. Girls on the internet were tall or positioned their cameras so as to appear to be.
Boys I didn’t like found my size discouraging.
Still, at times like this, I wished the process would slow down a little.
I had years left in which to eventually match my mother’s even six feet.
At the same time, I felt protected by the banal familiarity of the restaurant.
This wasn’t really the grand swimming pool of the world, just a puddle in which we were free to titillate ourselves by splashing around half naked.
And if we looked nothing akin to anyone else, we looked entirely right with each other, Eleanor in her hot-pink linen matching set cropped camisole and high-rise A-line miniskirt and me and Margaret in the related but unidentical dresses we’d eventually chosen to reveal our contoured chests.
I tried to settle into the silk skin of our cumulative effect.
I may have made what hips I had swish. If you feel like disappearing, sometimes the best countermeasure is to make yourself more visible.
Margaret waved to a friend of her mother’s, whose husband was wearing cargo shorts and a pair of water sandals.
Ohio will not allow you to pretend you’re anywhere else.
She walked over to greet them, abandoning me and Eleanor to follow the hostess.
Eleanor slid into the booth across from me, our eyes on each other in acknowledgment of the miniature social predicaments into which Margaret so often thrust us and herself.
Absently, she raised a hand to her face.
“They’re still there,” I said of the rhinestones. She looked embarrassed instead of relieved.
Margaret returned to us with a report. Some girl we sort of knew had been forced to come home from camp early on account of an untreated urinary tract infection that turned into a kidney infection for which she’d had to go to the hospital. We ordered our pizza and settled in to discuss.
“Obviously she was having a lot of sex at camp and didn’t know you’re supposed to pee afterward,” Margaret said, scooting farther into the booth beside me.
We knew you were supposed to pee afterward because one of Eleanor’s older sisters had told her and she’d told us, and now Margaret acted as though this were information she’d had all along.
“You’re insane,” Eleanor said. “I don’t know how you get people to tell you these things in like the briefest interactions.”
Margaret preened.
“It’s an effect she has,” I explained. “She pulls the gossip out of people with her face.” I took Margaret’s cheeks into my hands, looked into her eyes, and said in a hypnotized voice, “I must reveal all my secrets.”
“Yes, tell me,” Margaret said.
I let go of her face and shrugged. “You know them all already.”
Eleanor, who had wedged her hands palms down beneath her thighs, leaned forward onto the table conspiratorially.
“What about my face?” she asked. “What does my face tell you to do?”
Anxiety fluttered like fabric in the breeze of my mind, the sense that I needed to perform—or risk loss. El never would have asked anyone else to tell her who she was.
“Your face says you already know everything, and so you don’t need to be told.”
She gave me a fae grin of satisfaction. I received it as a physical reward, the hair on my arms all gone upright.
This was, at the time, how I saw Eleanor and how she herself most wanted to be seen—complete, already in possession of whatever it was most people sought from each other—neither of us yet realizing what this impression might serve to conceal.
Our waitress walked by with somebody else’s pizza over her shoulder.
Margaret flipped her phone over. She’d been keeping it face down on the table.
We all saw her lock screen light up, a picture of the three of us, without any new notifications.
She turned it over again. By then, it was clear we had no plan.
I thought probably no plan would present itself.
No one we knew was about to unexpectedly throw a party.
No friends of ours had access to vacant houses or knew doormen at bars who accepted drastically underaged patrons.
There weren’t even any bars nearby, just restaurants with seats and alcohol.
Not that eons of teenagers in our neighborhood hadn’t previously overcome these limitations in the name of debauchery.
I just didn’t think we were capable of joining them, not yet.
Condensation from our red plastic tumblers of ice water pooled on the almost laminated surface of the table.
Eleanor touched the torn white paper wrapper from her straw just barely to the lip of the water.
Liquid climbed and dampened the paper. The wait for food dragged.
We found ourselves neither on the way to nor from an experience, so we could neither anticipate future fanfare nor retroactively assign significance to the medium amount of fun we’d already had.
We just had to sit there and wait for pizza in a restaurant full of babies.
“I’m trying Bea,” Margaret announced, so we would know she’d given up on the boy without us having to ask.
Probably she’d double-texted him and not heard back.
The shame of wanting something from someone who wasn’t giving it to her made Margaret agitated and determined. My nerves prickled in my armpits.
“Worst-case scenario—” I began to suggest, but she pushed back right away.
“No. No worst-case scenario. We’re going out. Mandatory.”
“Yeah,” Eleanor agreed. She never had to say no to anything. She was allowed to go wherever she was invited. “It’s mandatory.”
When the pizza came, at least we could take pictures of ourselves.
Margaret crossed her arms to exaggerate her cleavage and leaned her head on my shoulder while I smiled.
I crossed my arms for the same reason and fed a slice of pizza to Margaret, who mimed eating it.
Then I switched to the other side of the booth, so that Eleanor wouldn’t have to take pictures by herself.
I leaned my back up against hers and pouted.
She rolled her eyes until they went all the way white beside the rhinestones and stuck out her tongue.
Even though we moved through these poses quickly, I couldn’t help looking around the restaurant to apologize with my eyes for behaving so conspicuously like denizens of the internet.
But I wanted the pictures. I wanted the documentation, the proof of the three of us at every minute.
And I conceded to myself that we weren’t really doing anything wrong, just making a minor spectacle with our conscious girlness that everybody else was free to ignore.
I never returned to the other side of the table. We paid the check at the front. Each of us put a mint in our mouths.